News from the Web

Eric Schmidt tells Hay festival that legal information 'even if it's despicable, will be indexed', and may help track terrorists

Google's indexing of extremist websites helps police track their activity and will continue, the company's chief told an audience at the Hay festival.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was asked to act to take down terrorist-sympathising websites from his search engines during a question and answer session at the literary festival on Saturday.

This weekend MPs, including the Labour politician Paul Flynn, called on the company to prevent searches listing sites for groups such as the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab.

Schmidt said: "We cannot prima facie identify evil and take it down. We have taken the decision that information if it's legal, even if it's despicable, will be indexed."

He went on to argue that extremists are usually possible to detect through their internet activity and that their online presence can sometimes help.

"Extremists are not clever enough not to be found out. They leave a digital trail the police can follow," he said, after an interview with the mathematician Marcus de Sautoy.

Schmidt put the ball firmly back in the court of government when it came to questions raised this month about corporate tax avoidance, following criticism that Google does not pay a fair level of tax in Britain. Answering a question posed from an impassioned audience member, he said: "I am rather perplexed by this issue. The international tax regime has been around a long time. No rational computer scientist would have erected such a system."

He said that decisions about these matters should be taken by elected governments and not companies. "Under US law we have a fiduciary responsibility to do what we're doing. We understand the complaint but we can't fix it. The British government can fix it," he said.

Asked if Google is now more powerful than many countries and whether it in effect operates just like one, Schmidt said it was not an aim of the company. "We're not becoming a state. We don't want to be because states have a lot of complicated problems.

"On the whole, it is a fight between the internet community and government who do what they want to do. We can't force governments to do what we want," he said.

• Google
• Hay festival
• Festivals
• Privacy
• Internet

Booker Prize winner, known for her succinct tales, says her publisher is keen for her to try writing stories on Twitter

The Booker Prize winner Lydia Davis, who made her first public appearance at the Hay festival on Friday morning, is considering writing fiction on Twitter.

The American writer is famous for her succinct short stories, some only a few lines long, and has now been asked by her publisher to experiment with microblogging.

"He asked me to try it and I think I might for a while, although I am worried about opening up a new area to keep up with," she said after reading from one of her longer works, a story that runs for eight pages.

Perhaps the best known of a rather esoteric Booker shortlist this year, Davis, 65, has refined her craft down to the pithiest of tales, often focusing on the complications of human communication.

She said she does not yet have a Twitter account but is drawn to the idea, despite the fact she writes with pen and paper.

"I do see an interest in writing for Twitter," Davis, from Massachussetts, said. "While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life."

She already tends to use language that is most suited to Twitter, preferring anglo-saxon words of one syllable. "I do love the basic anglo-saxon," she said, "though we are very lucky to have the latinate words as well in English. If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person I would use the latinate vocabulary more, but I do think anglo-saxon is the language of emotion."

An experienced literary translator in several languages, Davis agreed that her style of writing off the cuff, without much planning, might also suit the microblogging format. "I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it."

At the same time the author wanted to draw attention to the value of the longer form. "I do think novels are overlooked," she said. "I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called The End of the Story, not to blow my own horn."

The process did not come naturally to her though. "It was very difficult to write. I had to make diagrams. Sustaining that drive was something I wasn't used to," she admitted.

• Hay festival
• Festivals

Final work by Nobel prize-winning author of The Good Earth, continues her exploration of Chinese-American themes

A newly discovered manuscript by the American Nobel prize winner Pearl S Buck is set for publication this autumn, 40 years after her death.

Best known for her 1931 novel The Good Earth – a bestselling saga of a Chinese family which won her the Pulitzer – Buck took the Nobel in 1938, cited for "her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". Over the course of her life, she wrote more than 80 books, a mix of novels, short stories, children's and non-fiction titles, and now, 40 years after her death in 1973, a new piece of work has been discovered.

Open Road Media, which will publish The Eternal Wonder in October, said the novel was completed shortly before Buck died, and was found in storage in January. In a joint statement, Buck's son Edgar Walsh, Open Road's Jane Friedman and agent Michael Carlisle of InkWell said that The Eternal Wonder was "as brilliant and inspiring as Pearl Buck's most famous works, and we look forward to readers across the world getting to enjoy this long-lost masterpiece this fall along with Buck's other wonderful books".

The novel is a coming-of-age story, said Open Road, about "an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever – and, ultimately, to love". While in Paris, Randolph Colfax – Rann – falls for Stephanie Kung, who "struggles to reconcile the Chinese part of herself with her American and French selves", while Rann "feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world".

Buck grew up in China with missionary parents, moving back to the US in 1934. Her novels, starting with East Wind, West Wind, deal with the clash of East and West.

Buck's biographer Peter Conn said that while the author's work suffered a drop in quality during the 1940s, "there are probably passages of interest" in The Eternal Wonder because Buck was "an extraordinary woman who led an incomparably fascinating life".

"Pearl Buck strongly shaped Western and specifically American perceptions of China to an extent that had not been seen in the past," he told the New York Times. "She actually can make claim to a unique kind of cultural achievement, which is to prepare Americans for the increasingly tangled relationship … with China for the next 70 or 80 years."

• Publishing
• Fiction
• Nobel prize for literature

Publisher says these books are 'no longer viable' as sales drop by more than a quarter

As figures show tumbling sales for poetry, authors including poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy are mourning news that one of the UK's most energetic independent publishers can no longer afford to publish individual collections.

After releasing more than 400 poetry collections, many by debut authors, and launching scores of careers, Salt said earlier this week that it will be focusing on poetry anthologies in the future. "We've seen our sales [of single-author collections] decline by over a quarter in the past year, and our sales have halved in the past five years," said director Chris Hamilton-Emery. "It's simply not viable to continue doing them unfunded … We have tried to commit to single-author collections by funding them ourselves, but as they have become increasingly unprofitable, we can't sustain it."

Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy said the decision was "extremely sad news". She added: "They publish some excellent poets and I hope that other publishers will offer space to the poets who will now find themselves without a publisher." Former poet laureate Andrew Motion said the news of Salt's withdrawal was "a great shame". "I think Chris is a terrific editor, with a great eye for new talent, and the opportunities he's been giving for new poets to have solo collections will be sorely missed," said Motion.

Salt counts amongst its authors the major American poet Charles Bernstein, the award-winning Australian poets John Tranter and John Kinsella, prize-winning British author Luke Kennard, and Eleanor Rees and Sian Hughes – both of whom have been shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection.

Official figures from Nielsen BookScan show a sharp decline in the overall poetry market in the last year. There was growth of around 13% in 2009, when the market was worth £8.4m, followed by small declines in 2010 and 2011, and then a major drop of 18.5% volume and 15.9% value in 2012, when the overall value of the market fell to £6.7m.

"It's a very tough world out there," said Hamilton-Emery. "For many years the market was static, and then it went into quite sharp decline, particularly through the traditional market of bricks and mortar booksellers. There has also been a massive increase in the number of poetry publications coming out. We think that's a good thing, but we can't commercially be part of it … As a very small, niche commercial publisher, we can't possibly sustain what we have done in the past."

Over the past two years, according to BookScan, the three bestselling poetry titles have all been by Duffy – The Christmas Truce (38,181 copies sold), The Bees (29,716) and The World's Wife (19,933). The rest of the top 10 is made up of three anthologies, The Odyssey, the Pam Ayres Classic Collection – and two more Duffy collections. The collected Philip Larkin comes in 13th place (10,152), behind more anthologies, and Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes in 14th (9,253). Even a prize-winning poet such as Sharon Olds has sold only 7,399 copies of her collection Stag's Leap, while John Burnside's Black Cat Bone sold 5,544 copies.

To put this in context, last week in just seven days Martina Cole's The Life sold 23,821 copies. Not a single Salt title appears in the top 100 poetry books sold over the last two years, according to BookScan figures.

Instead of producing individual poetry collections, Salt will focus on its Best British Poetry anthology series, on fiction – its author Alison Moore was shortlisted for the Booker prize last year – and on increasing its non-fiction.

Its decision has hit online poetry community hard. "The news that their poetry publishing will now be slashed to a single annual anthology is terrible for British poets. I mean, their list is bursting with talent: a whole, brilliant generation," blogged the poet Clare Pollard. "Seriously, where are all these poets going to go? Why couldn't Salt find an audience for such an embarrassment of talent? The Arts Council seems happy to pour funding into encouraging a glut of aspiring writers, but what exactly are they supposed to aspire to when poets of this quality find themselves without a publisher for their next book?"

Salt poet Katy Evans-Bush told the Guardian that Salt's move would "leave a big gap, in more ways than one".

"Salt has made a huge difference to the landscape of UK poetry publishing: it's opened up boundaries … and made a space for some of the most exciting poetry being written at the moment. If, as Chris says , this really is a great time to be writing poetry, it's partly because of him," she said, referring to Hamilton-Emery's official statement that "there's never been a better time for poets to write. There are huge opportunities for poets to publish in new ways – and there are scores of new presses emerging, too. It's an exciting time."

"It's salutary to remember that when Salt started expanding its list, it did so in a climate where a lot of very good poets were finding it hard to get first collections out," said Evans-Bush. "Several of us had been students of Michael Donaghy and I know he was demoralised, seeing us not getting ahead. Then Salt came along with its seven-league boots and snapped up a little generation of us. It made everything possible. As the commissioning editor for the past couple of years, Roddy [Lumsden]'s been doing it for another little generation. I think Salt will be hugely missed – more even than many people realise."

• Poetry
• Publishing
• Poet laureate
• Carol Ann Duffy
• Andrew Motion

The What Jane Saw website, launching on Saturday, will allow the public to experience the 1813 exhibition of Joshua Reynold's paintings, as seen by Austen

Some still think of Jane Austen as a modest country mouse, wedded to the quiet sameness of village life. In fact, she loved going to London and went there often. When she was in town she went to the theatre, sampled the shops and attended fashionable gatherings. One of these latter events is replicated in virtual fashion by a website that launches on Saturday by conscientious American Janeites, called What Jane Saw.

In May 1813, a few months after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Austen was in London, staying with her brother Henry. The event of the season was the exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds's paintings at the British Institution in Pall Mall. Lord Byron and the Prince Regent attended the opening. This was the first modern museum blockbuster, and the first retrospective exhibition in Britain dedicated to the work of a single artist (Reynolds died in 1792). Exactly 200 years ago, Austen herself went to see the exhibition, describing it enthusiastically in a letter to her sister, Cassandra.

Now this new website, designed by Austen expert Janine Barchas at the University of Texas, allows anyone to make their own virtual visit to the show. What Jane Saw has been reconstructed from the detailed visitors' guide that has survived, effusive accounts in newspapers, and architectural measurements of the British Institution's rooms (the building was demolished in the 1860s). The 141 paintings would have interested Austen not only for their artistic qualities, but because they included portraits of the celebrities of her youth, including Samuel Johnson; Omai, the South Sea prince; and the actor Sarah Siddons. Siddons herself attended to see the grand portrait of her younger self "as the Tragic Muse". Today's virtual visitors will see that she hung next to a huge oil of the King George III. Austen would surely have been amused to see that both sitters have been given thrones. Monarchs of culture were monarchs, too.

• Jane Austen
• Exhibitions